You Won’t Learn Much Playing the Same Record on the Same Setup

More on the Subject of Developing Your Critical Listening Skills 

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written around 2006, about two years after we started to put Hot Stampers on our website.

This is one of the early posts we wrote to help explain what we were up to.

You learn almost nothing from the same record played back on the same system.

What you must do is learn to listen for differences in the sound, and differences only come about as the result of a change.

You have to change something in the system to develop your critical listening skills.

How about this example: the difference in sound between any two sides of a record.

The only change there involves flipping the record over. No new equipment, no tweaks, no shootouts with dozens of alternate pressings. Just flip the record. How hard can it be?

Almost no record has the same sound on both sides, not the records we sell anyway. Where else have you ever read such a thing? Nowhere else, at least to my knowledge. Because not enough audiophiles and no — and I mean no as in zero — record dealers make the effort to listen critically.

If you can’t hear the difference on at least some of your records, it has to be one or both of the following.

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Bee Gees et al. – Saturday Night Fever

More 5 Star Albums

  • KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it brings this 70s classic to life on these vintage pressings
  • There’s real Bee Gees vocal magic here – “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep Is Your Love,” “More Than a Woman,” “Jive Talkin’,” and more
  • One of the most underrated tracks that holds up surprisingly well after all these years is “A Fifth of Beethoven,” and it sounds stunning here on this Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side two – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • It’s no walk in the park to find a copy with sonics this good, but here it is
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 5 stars: “Saturday Night Fever is virtually indispensable as a Bee Gees album, not just for the presence of an array of songs that were hits in their own right but because it offered the Gibb brothers as composers as well as artists…”
  • If you’re a Bee Gees fan, this title from 1977 is surely a Must Own

This copy of the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack has truly killer sound throughout, and that ain’t no jive talkin’! We collected a bunch of these and put them through the shootout process and were delighted to find out that some of the material on here can sound wonderful on the best pressings.

Like any compilation, some songs are going to sound better than others. The good news here is that most of the tracks you’d hope to be impressive actually are: “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep Is Your Love” and “Disco Inferno” are among the better-sounding songs here.

Find your favorite song on here, drop the needle, and see if the dramatically improved sound doesn’t bring back some special memories, and maybe even inspire you to bust a move!

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Listening For the Spirit and Enthusiasm of the Musicians

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The discussion below, brought about by a Hot Stamper shootout we conducted for Revolver quite a number of years ago (2007!), touches on many issues near and dear to us here at Better Records.

Some of the things we learned about Revolver all those years ago are important to our Hot Stamper shootouts to this very day, including, but not limited to:

  • Pressing variations,
  • System upgrades,
  • Dead wax secrets,

and the quality we prize most in a recording:

  • LIFE, or, if you prefer, energy.

At the end of the commentary we of course take the opportunity to bash the MoFi pressing of the album, a regular feature of our Beatles Hot Stamper shootouts. We’re not saying the MoFi Beatles records are bad; in the overall scheme of things they are mostly pretty decent. What we are saying is that, with our help, you can do a helluva lot better.

Our help doesn’t come cheap, as anyone on our mailing list will tell you. You may have to pay a lot, but with us you get what you pay for, and we gladly back up that claim with a 100% money back guarantee for every pressing we sell.

The Story of Revolver, Dateline October 2007

(Incidentally, 2007 turns out to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records.)

White Hot Stampers for Revolver are finally HERE! Let the celebrations begin! Seriously, this is a very special day for us here at Better Records. The Toughest Nut to Crack in the Beatles’ catalog has officially been cracked. Yowza!

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“…this BR copy just lifted the veil.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

One of our good customers had a few things to say about a Hot Stamper pressing of Meddle he purchased recently, which turned out to have the same stampers as the copy he already owned.

He had no way of knowing what the stampers of our copy were when he ordered it of course. It no doubt came as a surprise, but thankfully Michel did not judge the record we sent him by the stamper numbers. No, he judged it the way it should have been judged, by the sound.

In this case the sound was clearly superior to the copy he had even though the stampers of the two records were identical. (If you would like to see more examples of this phenomenon, we have plenty here. It actually happens all the time. It’s so common that we rarely bother to make blog posts about it. Years ago we wrote a piece about it expressing our views on the subject.)

Hi Tom,

Just a quick note about Meddle WHS. I also had an A!/B! XXX which does sound pretty good and is quiet, but this BR copy just lifted the veil.

Once I dialed in the sweet spot it was a delightful experience. This copy is the bomb!!

Many Thanks,
Michel

Michel,

Not all A!/B!’s are created equal!

Most copies of the album with the right stampers will earn a grade of Super Hot, A++.

Some will be White Hot, A+++.

Almost all the pressings we play will have the same stamper numbers, although you may have read that we did just find another stamper for side two that can win shootouts.

Some of the difference in sound is the result of our using The Prelude Record Cleaning System, in conjunction with the Odyssey record cleaning machine we purchased in 2007 (more on that here).

Clean records sound better than they uncleaned records, and properly cleaned records often sound much better than they otherwise would, oftentimes a full grade better.

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Black Sabbath – Vol. 4

More of the Music of Black Sabbath

  • With KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides of this vintage Green Label pressing, we guarantee you’ve never heard Vol. 4 sound this good
  • A tough shootout, as no other copy earned a 3+ grade on either side, which simply means that when you find a top copy, it sets such a high standard that everything else ends up getting marked down
  • Both sides here are really rockin’ — big and full-bodied with an abundance of bass and the kind of performance energy that gets sucked right out of the music on the reissues, not to mention the no-doubt-worse modern pressings
  • We agree with Henry Rollins, who said, “Sabbath could be my favorite band… There’s something about their music that’s so painful and yet so powerful.”
  • This is a lot of money for a somewhat noisy copy, but the sound is so awesome and quiet pressings of the album so hard to come by that we hope someone will take a chance on it and get the thrill we did from hearing it sound right for once
  • 5 stars: “… it does find Sabbath at their most musically varied, pushing to experiment amidst the drug-addled murk… Die-hard fans sick of the standards come here next, and some end up counting this as their favorite Sabbath record for its eccentricities and for its embodiment of the band’s excesses.”

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Coltrane / Hartman – John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman

More of the Music of John Coltrane

  • A vintage copy of this classic Jazz Vocal album with very good Hot Stamper sound from first note to last
  • We had been working on this title for at least five years and had been coming up short time and again, with bad sound and bad vinyl on most of what we’d been buying
  • Five years ago we cracked the code for the right stampers to look for, and we had hoped to do shootouts for this wonderful album on a more regular basis, but that turned out to be a pipe dream
  • They are ridiculously hard to come by, so ridiculously hard that we would be surprised if it doesn’t take another five years to get this shootout going
  • I defy anyone to name a Male Vocal record produced in the last forty years that can hold a candle to this one, sonically or musically
  • A wonderful collaboration between a horn player and a singer, perhaps the greatest of all time
  • 5 stars: “John Coltrane’s matchup with singer Johnny Hartman works extremely well. Hartman was in prime form on the six ballads, and his versions of ‘Lush Life’ and ‘My One and Only Love’ have never been topped. Classic, essential for all jazz collections”

This could very well be the greatest collaboration between a horn player and a singer in the history of music.

I honestly cannot think of another to rank with it. Ella and Louis has the same feel — two giants who work together so sympathetically it’s close to magic, producing definitive performances of enduring standards that have not been equaled in the fifty plus years since they were recorded. And, on the better copies, or should we say the better sides of the better copies, RVG’s sound is stunning. (His mastering, not so much.)

Hats off to Rudy Van Gelder! Here’s an album that justifies his reputation. (more…)

Julie Is Her Name – What a Record!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocals Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We were shocked to discover a knockout Four Plus copy of Julie Is Her Name way back in 2010.

Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how we go about finding them. We no longer give out Four Pluses as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.

Nowadays we most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, seemingly out of nowhere, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it conpletely changed our appreciation of the recording itself.

We found ourselves asking “Who knew?” Perhaps a better question might have been “How high is up?”

Our Old Review

Beyond White Hot stamper sound on side one of this Turquoise Liberty Mono pressing – the sound is guaranteed to blow your mind. Julie is in the room with you – intimate, breathy and Tubey Magical like practically nothing you’ve ever heard. For late night listening this may be the best Sultry Female Vocal recording ever made.

Side One

This side had breathy resolution that was hard to believe, along with size and immediacy that no other side of any copy could touch. Phenomenal. (more…)

Balancing Richness and Tubey Magic with Transparency, Clarity and Speed

More Tubey Magical Rock and Pop Demo Discs Available Now

Manna has the clear signature of Elektra from the late 60s and early 70s. It’s unmistakably ANALOG, but that double-edged sword cuts both ways. Richness and Tubey Magic (the kind you had in your old 70s stereo equipment) often comes at the expense of transparency, clarity, speed and transient information (the things your 70s equipment probably struggled with).

We heard a lot of copies that were opaque, smeary and dull up top, so the trick for us (and for those of you doing your own shootouts) is to find a copy with the resolving power and transparency that will cut through the thickness.

Look for breath on the vocals (reverb too!) and extended vocal and guitar harmonics; if those two qualities are strongly evident you can’t be too far off.

More presence, bigger bass (the bass is HUGE on the best copies!), more size, energy and space: these will help take you to the highest (Super Hot and White Hot) levels.

Speaking of bass, notice how prominent, big and clear the bass guitar is on many of these songs. This is not a sound we hear nearly enough of on popular recordings. During the shootout we were lovin’ it.

The Legacy Focus in our reference system has three twelve-inch woofers per channel. They do a lovely job with this kind of big-bottom-end recording, the kind of recording for which Botnick and The Doors (and Love too, let’s not forget them) are justly famous.

Where is that sound today? We miss it.

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Heart – Little Queen

More of the Music of Heart

  • A Little Queen like you’ve never heard, with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER on both sides of this original Portrait pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • “Barracuda” and “Love Alive” are bar none two of Heart’s best songs and they are guaranteed to blow your mind on a copy with sound like this
  • It’s the rare copy that has the energy, dynamics, deep bass, punchy drums and meaty guitars that you get on this pressing
  • A Rock and Pop Top 100 album with Demo Disc sound on a very special pressing such as this – it will rock your world
  • 4 1/2 stars: “After acquiring a substantial following with Dreamboat Annie, Heart solidified its niche in the hard rock and arena rock worlds with the equally impressive Little Queen.”

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Robert Brook Tells His Story on “The Skeptical Audiophiles”

More YouTube Videos (Including The Skeptical Audiophiles)

Robert and I have now started a YouTube channel. Its purpose is to help audiophiles gain a better understanding of analog records and the many difficulties one encounters when playing them. Here I speak from experience, as does Robert.

We felt that it would be worthwhile to briefly talk about our backstories, so that viewers could appreciate why we choose to call ourselves “Skeptical Audiophiles” in the first place. This is Episode 2. Episode 1 can be found here.

If you’re looking for a different take on the subjects we will be addressing with our new channel, we happily offer them for your viewing pleasure.

If you would like to know more about audio and records, please feel free to ask any questions you have in the comments section, or send them directly to me at tom@better-records.com. (The blog has hundreds of letters — from customers and critics alike — you may enjoy reading as well.)

One of the more popular pieces Robert has written recently was entitled: The Biggest Misconception about Modern Audiophile Records. We feel it is well worth reading.

Robert’s Approach

Robert has methodically and carefully — one might even say scientifically — approached the various problems he’s encountered in this hobby by doing the following:

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